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Letter to the Editor: De Blasio And Affordable Housing


Dear Editor,
 
The article “De Blasio Pins Affordable Housing Hopes on Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning” correctly highlights the challenge of requiring affordable housing in any new developments that depend on zoning changes.
 
One alternative de Blasio should consider is to mandate the construction of middle-income housing only in the development of city-owned land.  The city successfully took this tact with Seward Park, a strip of city-owned land on the Lower East Side, by obligating RFP respondents to make at least half of the housing units there affordable. Refining the requirements to be more capital market friendly may have enabled an even greater amount of middle-income units.
 
Requiring affordable housing to be built as part of city RFPs – as opposed to all development projects – will send a signal that he wants to work with the real estate industry to create badly needed affordable housing and strengthen New York’s middle class.
 
Leonard Grunstein

Leonard Grunstein is an expert in real-estate finance who worked on the original ground-lease deal for Battery Park City as well as on other public-private projects in the city.

Op-Ed: A Road Map to Wipe Out Homelessness


housing

There's reason for optimism about ending homelessness as we know it in New York City.

Sure, the problem has never been worse. There are 57,000 homeless people daily in city homeless shelters or living on the streets, probably more. At least 22,000 of them are kids and, for them, brushes with homelessness may lead to a lifetime of consequences.

But now a loosely knit network of community-based groups, calling themselves United to End Homelessness, have joined to author and promote a detailed plan. They fittingly called it "A Roadmap to Ending Homelessness."

The ad-hoc group (which many members hope will become permanent) started with 13 desperate groups. It has now grown to be a union, this one with more than 130 organizations endorsing the platform.

The groups don't share just a single mission or business interest. Some operate shelters; success could put them out of business. Others develop or advocate for specific types of housing but have readily endorsed other approaches, too.

It's also not just groups that work on homelessness. The coalition includes faith groups, neighborhood organizations and a range of broad-based human service and social justice entities. It includes big names and small ones from every section of the city.

Their common commitment to ending homelessness is the unusual example of wide-ranging grassroots groups, sometimes separated by competing convictions or economic interests, working for a public goal they can agree on — ending homelessness.

Their 39-page plan sometimes reads like it was written by housing and homeless experts; other times like an emotional plea to do what's right. That's probably because — can you imagine this — it was written, reviewed and finally accepted by all 130 organizations.

The old saying is it was a big committee that came up with the camel. This one, though, wrote a real plan.

The timing isn't random. It comes just weeks before an election sure to shake up city policies for decades with a new mayor, all new citywide officials and several new City Council members, too.

Nicole Branca, deputy executive director of the Supportive Housing Network of New York, is a steering committee member. She says the group’s "is that this briefing book provides the next administration with the research, ideas and motivation to develop and start implementing a plan to end homelessness on day one."

This is no pie-in-the-sky plan from do-gooders. It's a war plan against homelessness that actually saves taxpayer dollars. Their research says it costs $36,000 a year to keep a family in shelter, but just $6,000 to prevent homelessness in the first place.

They say the city and state pay $78 a day for a person in shelter, $165 if they're in prison and $802 a day for a psychiatric hospital. The cost of subsidizing a homeless person in housing, including the supportive services they need, is $68.

The UEH platform proposes robust programs to build affordable housing for very-low income people, supportive housing for those who need it and an effective rent subsidy to move families from more expensive city shelters to less expensive permanent housing. They want a return to the city's historically successful targeting of a small portion of public housing for moving people out of shelters, too.

These ideas have worked elsewhere. Some were successful here in the past, but eliminated in budget cuts or policy changes. The UEH platform is not just a reprise of past programs, though; they detail specific strategies and evidence-based practices designed to make each program work.

Some ideas are brand new, at least here. One example, and a no-cost one at that, is creating an "Interagency Council on Homelessness," like the one the federal government uses effectively. "It calls out the key players that must participate cooperatively" to create the city's first-ever coordinated Interagency effort to end homelessness, according to Christy Parque, executive director of Homeless Services United and the generally recognized organizer of UEH.

The interagency council idea is designed to address what Parque calls "a decades-old problem that has plagued the city" where one agency or another serves as a feeder of newly minted homeless people without coordinated plans to fix the problem.

The city's Department of Homeless Services spends nearly $1 billion yearly on homeless shelters. That's not including the expenses of multiple shelter programs under other agencies. Prevention programs for those at-risk of homelessness, moving families very quickly to permanent housing and providing the numerous other pathways to stable housing the platform advocates is the right thing to do, but it isn't cheap. Reducing DHS's shelter costs could pay for most of it.

There are other cost efficiencies in ending homelessness, too. It's proven to cut health care and emergency room use at dramatic cost savings. It's proven to reduce public safety and jail costs, as well as reduce mental health system and other public service requirements.

There's also the promise of incalculable savings in human suffering, broken families, developmental and emotional delays for children and the second-chance opportunities it could bring to tens of thousands of New Yorkers.

"When homelessness absolutely cannot be prevented," the group says, "safe, decent appropriate shelter should be provided for those who need it," but as a temporary step on the pathway to permanent housing.

The only way to truly know the group’s roadmap would work in the real world is, of course, to try it. The plan offers diverse routes to housing for a diverse set of circumstances, is well researched and documented and promises far better outcomes at cost-effective and cost-savings prices.

I'm hardly an unbiased observer, but I'm all-in betting the roadmap can get us where we need to go.

Jeff Foreman is policy director at Care for the Homeless. Follow him on twitter at @JeffForeman2.

De Blasio Should Mandate Affordable Housing In City RFPs


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Bill de Blasio¹s goal of building or preserving 200,000 affordable housing units during his all-but-certain mayoral administration is laudable, but it is also causing unnecessary angst in the real estate industry.

Instead of forcing developers to include affordable housing in every single rezoning application, as de Blasio proposed this month, he should mandate the construction of middle-income housing only in requests for proposals for the development of city-owned land.

Tempering his position in this way will demonstrate he is willing to work with the real estate industry on an important issue and, more importantly, go a long way toward solving our affordable housing problem.

The need for middle-income housing in New York City is vital. It helps support our burgeoning economy by providing affordable places for employees of city businesses to live. When these employees are priced out and forced to move, fewer dollars will be spent here in the city.

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Some of New York City¹s most well established communities have been founded on this principle of affordability. From Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan, to Parkchester in the Bronx, middle-income housing developments have enabled working-class New Yorkers to thrive in the city for generations.

Unfortunately, while more than 140,000 affordable homes have reportedly been created or preserved since the start of the Bloomberg administration, this included few middle-income units. The number could have been significantly higher if the city required private developers to include affordable housing units in their proposals to city RFPs.

One recent example of a missed opportunity is the city¹s RFP for the redevelopment of the Brooklyn Heights Library. Issued in June, it allows for the redevelopment of an underutilized public library into a residential, commercial or community facility building.

But the RFP did not include any requirements for developers to build affordable housing at the site. While there is a small incentive to build affordable housing offered through the city¹s inclusionary housing program ­ which allows developers to construct a larger building if they agree to create or preserve affordable housing in the area ­ this program is voluntary. More can be done in terms of zoning bonuses or overrides for these sites to foster the creation of middle-income affordable housing.

The city should not leave the decision to include affordable housing up to the developer. Instead, it should have required the construction of affordable housing as part of the RFP and guaranteed the creation of a place where middle-income New Yorkers could live.

{pullquote}By requiring affordable housing to be built as part of all city RFPs, Bill de Blasio¹s administration will add to the long-term sustainability and vitality of our city.{/pullquote}

A perfect counterpoint is Seward Park, ­ a large swath of city-owned land on the Lower East Side that has been vacant for more than four decades. There, the city recently took the monumental step of requiring RFP respondents to make at least half of the housing units affordable. Fine-tuning the requirements could also make them more capital markets-friendly and yield even more middle-income affordable housing.

While some still debate whether the Seward Park RFP could have included even more affordable housing units, there is no reason the city should not continue and expand this practice when it comes to the library site and all future RFPs for the redevelopment of city-owned land.

If similar requirements had been in place for the massive Hudson Yards development, there would be an additional 5,000 units of affordable housing constructed. The thousands of people who will eventually work in that new neighborhood could have filled these apartments rather than having to commute from long distances.

That¹s an unnecessary burden for those workers as well as a loss for the city¹s economy.

By requiring affordable housing to be built as part of all city RFPs, Bill de Blasio¹s administration will add to the long-term sustainability and vitality of our city. People of all income levels will once again be able to call this city home, and the neighborhoods they live in will be better off for it.

Leonard Grunstein is an expert in real-estate finance who worked on the original ground-lease deal for Battery Park City as well as on other public-private projects in the city.



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